Altar of Oba A pillar of light

Altar of Oba stood in Black Rock City in 2023, a piece built with lead artist Dipo Doherty that paid homage to the ancient Benin culture and served as a pillar of colour and light for the ideas that embody Afrofuturism.

My role was lighting and power. Dipo's vision was already there in the panels; the job was to give it a second life after dark, in light that answered the colour he had painted rather than washing over the top of it.

The eyes

The signature fixtures were made rather than bought: custom acrylic iridescent eyes, each carrying a very bright, very bold, fully addressable LED trim. Iridescent acrylic is a difficult material to light. It changes what it does depending on where you stand, so the trim had to be strong enough to read across the open playa and still leave the acrylic something to do up close.

Colour that follows the panels

A Raspberry Pi ran the show, driving custom animation code written for this piece. The brief for every pattern was the same: accentuate the colours and the movement already in the panels. Light on a sculpture can either compete with the artwork or extend it, and the difference is almost entirely in whether the palette and the direction of travel were taken from the piece itself.

Power

The other half of the title, and the half nobody photographs. A piece on the playa has to carry its own supply, survive dust and a forty degree swing between afternoon and dawn, and come up again after every shutdown without anyone climbing it.

This is an early draft. The account of the piece and my part in it is accurate; the photographs, the fixture build, the power layout and the animation code are still to come.